On the campaign trail: It's all about the college degree

View full sizeGerald Herbert / APRepublican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign rally at the Royal Oak Theater in Royal Oak, Mich., on Monday.

When Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum calls President Barack Obama “a snob” for wanting all Americans to attend college, he may be out of step with the public’s overall view of higher education.

Many Americans are suspicious of the culture of academia, and most are angry about rising costs. But they overwhelmingly — and increasingly — agree that higher education is important and aspire to it for themselves and their children.

On the campaign trail, Santorum has criticized what he perceives as the liberal nature of the higher education community.

For his part, Obama has called for all Americans to obtain some form of education beyond high school, although not necessarily four-year colleges as Santorum has repeatedly implied, and for the United States to regain the global lead in those with college degrees by 2020.

Many of Obama’s higher-education initiatives, including a proposed $8 billion fund unveiled as part of his budget proposal earlier this month, focus on workforce development at community colleges that award certificates and degrees of less than four years.

SNIPING ON PRIMARY EVE

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are swapping insults as they prepare for Tuesday’s primaries in Michigan and Arizona. Romney calls Santorum a nice guy who has never had a job in the private sector. Santorum says Romney’s tax plans include “just more Obama-style class warfare” and echo the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street.

Polls showed a close race in Michigan, where Romney was born and won a primary in his first bid for the White House four years ago. By contrast, Romney is favored to capture Arizona and all its 29 delegates. Neither of the other two contenders, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, has made much of an effort in either Michigan or Arizona.

GINGRICH LINKS SANTORUM TO LABOR

Newt Gingrich is slamming Rick Santorum as a “big labor Republican,” accusing him of siding with unions over Memphis-based FedEx when the Senate grappled with a labor dispute in the 1990s. Gingrich is hoping to revive his struggling campaign in the South, and he tailored his message to Republican voters in Tennessee.

Gingrich is challenging the former Pennsylvania senator and his conservative credentials. In accusing Santorum of voting for unions over FedEx, he cited a provision in a 1996 spending bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that sought to help FedEx truck drivers in their efforts to organize. A group of Democrats held up the FAA bill to protest what they said was an attempt to help FedEx prevent its truck drivers from forming a union.

The former House speaker issued the criticism in Nashville. FedEx is based in Memphis.

ANOTHER SHOT WITH FEMALE VOTERS

President Barack Obama may be back in the good graces of women. His support dropped among this critical constituency just before the new year began and the presidential campaign got under way in earnest.

But his standing with female voters is strengthening, polls show, as the economy improves and social issues, including birth control, become a bigger part of the nation’s political discourse. The recent furor over whether religious employers should be forced to pay for their workers’ contraception is certainly a factor but hardly the only reason for women warming up to Obama again after turning away from him late last year.

An Associated Press-GfK poll suggests women also are giving the president more credit than men are for the country’s economic turnaround. Among women, his approval ratings on handling the economy and unemployment have jumped by 10 percentage points since December.

OHIO BOUND

Regardless of the outcome of Republican presidential primaries in Michigan and Arizona, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum appear headed for a showdown next week in Ohio. Both candidates plan to dash there later this week.

The candidates and their allies already are spending heavily on advertising in Ohio, one of 10 states that vote March 6, Super Tuesday, with 419 delegates to the Republican National Convention at stake.

Beyond Ohio, Romney was looking to contests in the West while Santorum focuses on the South. Newt Gingrich, seeking to inject momentum into his struggling bid, was working to make his stand in his former home state of Georgia and nearby Southern states that also vote March 6.

Ron Paul also planned events in upcoming states, showing no willingness to abandon his quest to rack up enough delegates to ensure his followers have a voice at the late-summer convention and that the Republican Party which once spurned him welcomes him back into the fold.

All of the divergent strategies suggest the race could go deep into March — if not beyond — without giving any of the candidates a significant edge.

BY THE NUMBERS

94: Percentage of parents who think their child will go to college, according to a Pew poll. 75: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “very important,” according to a Gallup poll. 21: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “fairly important.” 4: Percentage of Americans calling a college education “not important.” 4.2: Unemployment rate for workers with at least a bachelor’s degree. 7.2: Unemployment rate for workers with some college. 8.4: Unemployment rate for workers with only a high school degree. 13.1: Unemployment rate for workers with no high school degree.

WHAT THEY SAID

“President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. ... There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren’t taught by some liberal college professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.” — Santorum.

“When I speak about higher education we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school.” — Obama.

“He’s had two weeks of being the alternative (to Romney). The fact is, I think there are profound reasons that Rick lost the Senate race by the largest margin in Pennsylvania history in 2006, and I think it’s very hard for him to carry that all the way to the general.” — Gingrich on Santorum.

“I’ve spent 25 years in business. I understand why jobs go, why they come, I understand what happens to corporate profit, where it goes if the government takes it. This is what I’ve done throughout my life.” — Romney.